ABSTRACT
The other extreme form of destruction, war, is addressed in Chapter 8, where the notion of chaotic murder is delineated, based on the intuition and prescience of two classical novelists: Stendhal and Tolstoy. The chapter distances itself from classical contributions that align variables such as time, space and scale to the practice of warfare. Sun Tzu’s treatise, for instance, weighs these variables in order to establish whether and when the circumstances are favourable to victorious battle. Von Clausewitz, in turn, argues that excitable heads will never win wars. This chapter, instead, conveys a notion of war far removed from the prescriptions of grand strategy: wars may well be won by excitable heads such as Stendhal’s antiheroes or by confused combatants who ignore what they are doing and why. Deception is key as is delusion, both causing an ocean of barbarity. The chapter weaves in novels presenting the arguments put forward by the contemporary criminology of war.
